(Jun 27, 1998: The system requirements on this page assume Windows 95 without BestMatch or NaturalWord. See How Much Memory Do You Really Need? for more information. BestMatch also requires approximately a 50% faster processor.)
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| The most obvious symptom of a bad sound card, meaning one which does not have sufficient quality to run a speed recognition dictation system, is the Dragon NaturallySpeaking will run slower than expected. Actually, Dragon NaturallySpeaking will also make more errors, but this is harder to measure and a bad sound card tends to impact is the first in the accuracy second. |
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| As I have mentioned before, you really should be able to dictate at near real-time on a Pentium 133 MHz processor with 32 MB of RAM. If you find that when dictating, Dragon NaturallySpeaking gets more than one sentence behind, you may have a problem. |
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| Having an inferior sound card is one possible reason that Dragon NaturallySpeaking will runs slowly for you, but it is not the only possible reason. There may be a system problem, like missing a decent processor cache, or having some other application running in the back run which interferes with NatSpeak that may be causing speed degradation. |
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| I recommend that if the Dragon NaturallySpeaking is running very slowly for you, you try is to borrow a decent sound card from a friend, and try that sound card instead. This of course is not always possible. |
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| (Important: when measuring the speed of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, make sure you dictated least one paragraph before you start measuring the speed to allow the virtual memory system to stabilize.) |
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| Another thing you can try, is to listen to the quality of the sound that Dragon NaturallySpeaking has actually recorded. Whenever you run the Audio Setup Wizard, Dragon NaturallySpeaking will save a file called "audio.wav" in the directory "c:\NatSpeak\program". You can open this file using the standard window sound recorder program. Listen to this reporting, make sure that it sounds clear, that is free from static and distortions. This file represent a sample for Dragon NaturallySpeaking hears. |
Finally, when you run General Training, keep in eye on how many times Dragon NaturallySpeaking makes you repeat things. If you are using a real bad sound card, than Dragon NaturallySpeaking will probably make you repeat lots of sentences during General Training.
On a good sound card, assuming that I speak clearly, I can get through General Training only having to repeat perhaps one sentence. However, what I first trained my mother's Dell computer (which is known to have a poor quality built-in sound system) that I found myself having to repeat at least one sentence every paragraph. This was a big clue. |